Blood from Stone

by Laura Anne Gilman

  A Retriever in work mode would have fritzed the camera, just off the no-see-me vibes he or she would emit, plus the natural tendency of Talent to wreak havoc on electronics in their vicinity. But there was no need to mention that right now, if the agent didn’t already know.

  “Do you know what he was after?” Sergei asked.

  “The museum declined to give us any more information than the rooms were used to store odd bits they had picked up over the years and not yet determined a provenance or display use for. They tend to keep their noses clean and their paperwork in order, so we didn’t push for details.” She shrugged, sipping her coffee and wincing at the taste. People apparently came to this diner for convenience, not quality. “Truthfully, normally we would never have been involved, save that it pinged on my radar screen.”

  “And you didn’t want to push for fear of alerting someone that you had found something of interest.”

  “Have I?” Anea asked, her expression one of cautious anticipation.

  Wren looked at her partner, who nodded, ever so slightly, his eyes half-lidded but alert. She would spill and he would survey the reaction, then.

  “We have reason to believe that they are after the be longings of…a Talent from several generations ago, in another country, who dabbled in things he should have left alone.”

  “Things.” Chang had the gift of packing a lot of questions into one word.

  Wren tapped her fingers on the menu, trying to decide how to phrase what little she was going to tell, without leaving too many openings for the other woman to pry at. Finally, she gave up and went for the kill.

  “He created a form—a living battery of sorts—that would allow a Talent to increase his or her abilities, and possibly bypass our…call it a surge protector.” Wren was pretty proud of that last analogy, actually, especially done on the fly.

  “And this is a bad thing?”

  “Bad for the battery,” Wren said. “The living battery.”

  Agent Change was not slow on the uptake, no. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened in a silent “oh.” “These belongings…they were in that storeroom? And included, perhaps, directions on how to accomplish this little parlor trick?”

  “Possibly. Probably, based on your information.”

  “And the person who tried to steal them…”

  “Hired by a group of people who should not have their hands on this material.” Wren was definite about that. It had to be them—the timing was too damned coincidental—and absolutely they should not get them. No matter who they were, any group that wanted those papers that badly should not have them. The Cosa had created a battery of their own—a nonliving, nonsentient one—and destroyed it, and the plans, after one use. For once in her life, she really did hold the high moral ground.

  “Who should, then? You?”

  Sergei jumped in at this point, taking Chang’s fire. “We have been retained by a legitimate heir to the original author to reclaim possession of the papers.”

  Lovely, legitimate, and the added benefit of being true. Mostly.

  “If these papers are that dangerous, I could use my own contacts to pry them from the museum—it would be simpler to—”

  “No!” Wren reacted immediately, and with more heat than she had been expecting. Chang looked taken aback, but Sergei was already nodding his head in agreement. Wren felt better about her instinctive response, then.

  “No?”

  “Whoever has these papers…they’ll be a target. Allowing a N—a non-Talent to handle them opens that person to too much risk. We—our client—will be able to protect them.” She hoped. They would have a better chance than a Null—even a partially Null government agent who, no matter her possible good intentions, still had layers of bureaucracy and political animals to report to. While she liked the other woman, you had to earn trust, in Wren’s world.

  Chang looked from Wren to Sergei, and pulled out another photo. This one was also black-and-white, but it wasn’t grainy. It was, in fact, crystal clear. Wren swallowed hard and looked away. Sergei didn’t blink.

  “The thief, I assume,” he said, referring to the body sprawled faceup on the pavement, the face hacked into shreds, the dark stain across his throat proof to how he had been killed.

  “As he was being transferred to another holding facility, his police escort was ambushed, and he was taken away. The assumption was that his partners, whoever they were, had staged a rescue.”

  She shrugged, clearly not broken up by the man’s demise. “The body was found seven hours later, dumped two blocks from the site of the ambush.”

  “The police officers?”

  “Banged up, lightly sedated, and pissed off, but otherwise all right. Whoever these people are, they knew better than to become cop-killers.”

  “Too much heat on them, then,” Sergei agreed. “Tying off a loose end, someone nobody will really miss…that would be investigated, but not hunted with the same dedication.”

  “Exactly.” Some lives were of more value than others. Nobody was arguing that. Probably why they had chosen a Null thief, whoever They actually were. The death of a Talent—local or imported—would have been noted and followed up on. Especially now, when the community was still reeling from recent events.

  “And you waited to tell us this until you were confident that we had nothing to do with it.” Sergei was moderately pissed-off himself. “How can you be sure?”

  “I suspect that your bodies tend not to show up,” Chang said evenly.

  Sergei’s eyes showed the wince his face was too well-trained to let escape. Wren wondered if Agent Chang had caught it, or not.

  She hoped not.

  “Thank you for your help,” she said, trying to distract attention from him, and the thought of dead bodies, necessary and hidden or otherwise. “We’ll handle this, going forward.”

  “And you will call me, if anything changes, or I can be of assistance?”

  “Sergei will. I tend to be…least in sight.”

  The agent-facade disappeared, and the woman Anea appeared, smiling in appreciation at the joke. “Thank you,” she said, and seemed to mean it. “For trusting me. I can only imagine that it is difficult. I will protect your confidences to the very best of my ability to do so.”

  Wren believed her.

  The agent looked at her watch, then swore and tapped it as though to resuscitate its workings. Wren felt a twinge of guilt, and quickly squelched it. If Agent Chang—Anea—wanted to hang with Talent, she was going to have to learn about things like watches, cell phones, PDAs and whatnot. Hopefully the Federal budget was up to a few replacements here and there.

  “Damn.” Chang cast her glance around the diner, finally finding a clock. “My train leaves in an hour. It’s been educational meeting you two, and my thanks for both your candor and your assistance. Here’s my card—the number on the front is my office line. If I’m not there it will transfer to the main line, and they will be able to reach me wherever I am.” She pushed the business card across the table and left it there for Sergei to pick up, while she shuffled the photos and reports back into her briefcase. Wren let her fingers rest on the sheet she had lifted from the pile, and didn’t say a word as farewell handshakes were exchanged and Chang left for Penn Station and her train back to D.C.

  “We’ll take care of it?” Sergei said, after the door closed behind the agent.

  “We have no choice, now. Even if the museum had no idea what they had in that room before, someone’s going to be a bright bunny and wonder about it, now. And all it takes is one really bright bunny poking around and maybe running a few experiments, and all hell could break loose. Remember the Nescanni Parchment?” That Artifact had been a soul-eater, and a friend had lost his life in the struggle to contain it. From the look on Sergei’s face, he remembered that, and the fact that the damned—literally—thing had almost eaten him. Only admitting that she loved him—that she needed him—had kept him connected to this world, and even that had been close.


  A tough couple of years, yeah. They had lost so much—and gained a lot, too, yeah. New friends, renewed ties among the old, mostly but not entirely offsetting the costs they’d paid. Seemed like the way life went: you had to pay before you got the goods, no credit offered.

  The fortune cookie came back to her, the way they tended to. Take no blood from stone, save you give it back. They’d bled enough to get back the entire damn city and half the ’burbs, by now. Somehow, she didn’t think that was what the fortune meant, though. If it were straightforward, it wouldn’t need a Seer to see.

  She pulled a sugar packet out of the holder and played with it, pushing it around on the Formica table. “For years, generations, this stuff’s been hidden. Now, it’s not so much hidden, because—” she shrugged “—because things like this tend not to stay lost forever. So odds are good that this thing gets out of holding, maybe into hands not ours. You want someone playing amateur Doctor Frankenstein? Or worse yet, holding an all-comers auction for the papers?” Wren pushed her point, wanting to make sure that he understood. “I don’t believe in coincidences, you know that. These people looking, I’m sure they’re the ones who took Geinga—the demon who sent P.B. the letter,” she clarified at his puzzled look. “The demon who, by the way, hasn’t been seen since about a week before P.B. got the letter. I put out some feelers into the Cosa, and it’s like he never existed. Nobody knows nuthin’, nobody saw nuthin’, nobody wants to talk about nuthin’. And it’s not the usual don’t-talk-to-strangers routine, either. These are Fatae that see everything, and don’t scare easy. But they’re scared now.

  “I wasn’t bullshitting Chang,” the Retriever went on. “Even just being in proximity to those papers isn’t going to be safe, if they are what we think they are, if they have the information we think they do. And even if they’re not, if other people think they are what they think they are they’ll show up sooner or later.” She tried to decide if that made any sense, decided that so long as Sergei was following her, pronouns were irrelevant. “The only way to remove the risk is to Retrieve the papers, to make them disappear again, this time forever.”

  She paused, contemplating that. How did you erase knowledge forever, once it was known? Just burning paper didn’t do it, when magic was concerned. “We were hamstrung before by not knowing exactly where the papers were. Now, thanks to our competitors doing the grunt work, we do.”

  “We did, rather.” Sergei pointed out. “As you said, one bright bunny, of which the museum has plenty, and they’ll take another hard look at what the thief tried to steal. He or she will start to poke around, take the rest of the material out of storage and move it somewhere else. Maybe even send it elsewhere to any expert in the country—or outside. We’re back to step two, only worse off, because more people have gotten their eyes on it.”

  Wren touched the report in her lap, the one with the full, classified theft report from Chang’s briefcase, and smiled at her partner. “Not exactly…”

  Anything not nailed down was a Retriever’s toy. Anything she could pry loose was not nailed down. Agent Chang would have to learn that about the Cosa, too.

  There was too much going on in her brain, so after she left Sergei to do his thing with blueprints and backgrounds, Wren went to the one place where she knew that she would be able to put it aside for a while, let it simmer while she worked out different muscles.

  “Twenty-three. Twenty-four.” She paused, before continuing. “Twenty-five.”

  “Valere. We got problems.”

  So much for no distractions. “Twenty-six.” This was a news flash? “We always got problems. We got heaps of problems. Twenty-seven.”

  “This is a new problem.”

  Wren was doing crunches, and her hair was flopping into her eyes, annoying the hell out of her. P.B. reached out and, with surprising delicacy, tucked the strands back under her sweatband.

  “Thanks. Twenty-eight.”

  “No problem.”

  She raised her torso again, and then stopped mid-movement. “I’ve lost count now.”

  The demon hunkered down beside the padded exercise mat, the mirror opposite them reflecting the incongruous sight of the white-pelted demon kneeling beside a woman in a red jog bra, black sweatpants and sneakers. “Valere, trust me. Least of our problems.”

  “Not a problem for you. You’re built like a damned brick. Me, doesn’t matter how many calories I burn, still doesn’t do a damn thing for my abs. You’d think current could do something about giving me a six-pack. But no…”

  “Valere, you’re babbling.”

  “You’re interrupting my workout. A workout I need so my brain is free to work through the details of your job, by the way, so interrupting me isn’t in your best interests. How did you get in, anyway? This gym’s females-only.”

  “Same way I get in anywhere,” he said in exasperation. “I walk in and nobody stops me because if they stop me they have to admit that they saw me. Valere, I don’t have much time, my shadow’s probably downstairs getting a temporary membership right now.”

  “Shadow?” That got her attention.

  “Shadow. Female, hence the guard downstairs not stopping her. Been following me for a couple-three days, I’m not sure how long, exactly, just when I noticed her. There may be others, but I haven’t smelled them.”

  His leathery black nostrils flared as though remembering the scent.

  Wren went back to doing her crunches, counting again from the beginning. “What does she smell like?”

  “Memories. And blood. It doesn’t matter. She’s one of them, or more likely working for them, because her sweat smells like she’s been drinking local water for longer than a month, and she’s been following me. I’ve spent the past twenty-four hours trying to stay as much in public as I can, to throw her off, and it’s starting to drive me insane.”

  Wren gave up on her workout, and sat up, taking off the sweatband and wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Why the hell didn’t you come to me when this shadow of yours first showed up?”

  He stared at her as if she had lost her mind. “Valere, you’re slipping. Why would I show them exactly where you were if I had any other choice? You think I want to hang a target around your neck that says ‘here’s my weak spot’?”

  “Oh. Right. And here I was worried about bringing them to you. We really need to work on our communication.”

  The demon bared his teeth in a gesture that wasn’t supposed to be a smile. “Next job. Let’s survive this one, first. They’re using magic to tag me, I can feel it whirling around on my skin, so yeah, they’re Talent. Not much, compared to what you haul around, but enough.”

  “You can feel current like that?”

  “When it’s directed at me, yeah. Especially now.”

  “Can they…are they able to pick up the thing with us?”

  The demon shook his head. “No. Someone would have to know both of us, and be looking, and know what he or she was looking for, to sense it. I think.”

  “You think.”

  “It’s not like there was a damned instruction booklet!” His voice rose in annoyance, and the older woman on the treadmill nearest them looked over curiously, then looked away quickly when P.B. glared at her.

  “Sorry. Look, you knew they were in town—you have a plan?”

  “Yeah. No. Maybe.” Wren bit her lip, uncertain.

  “That’s reassuring. Any minute now, my shadow’s gonna work her way in here and see us—what should I do?”

  She thought hard, fast. “Go home. While there are still people around on the street. Lock the doors and stay there.”

  “That’s your plan? Putting me under house arrest?” He wasn’t impressed. “You’ve done better.”

  “I need time. We knew someone was in town, two guy-types specifically. We didn’t know about this woman, we don’t know if there’s anyone else, hired or otherwise. And we need to know if she is just a hireling, and if so, if she has access to high-powered Talent or if they
’re all low-res like you say. Either way, if you’re home, at least one of them has to be there to watch you, so that person’s not my problem going forward. And I know where you are and I can have someone watching you.”

  “Nobody watching me!” the demon protested. “Nobody can know about this, that’s the deal!”

  She could almost see the wheels turning in his head. It was one thing to let his human know he was freaked out. And okay, her human got to know, because this was a tag-team deal. But anyone else…No.

  “My job’s based on being a tough guy, Valere. Word gets around I’m trapped in my apartment by a chickie, I’ll never work again.”

  “A chickie?” She didn’t know if she should be amused or insulted on this woman’s behalf.

  “Grant me my age and my slang. This female of lurking—damn it, there she is!”

  She risked a look over her shoulder, at where he was looking. “Go. Go home, P.B. Be obvious about it! And stay there, until one of us tells you it’s safe!”

  Grumbling, slamming his battered fedora onto his rounded head, the demon went.

  The woman, a slender dirty blonde wearing a denim jacket over jeans, and indistinguishable from a large chunk of the population, was walking up the stairs behind one of the gym reps, who was giving her the guest spiel. The blonde saw P.B. walking toward them and halted, staring as P.B. walked right past her, turning his head in order to give her a full long look at his face, and then he grinned, deliberately showing all of his rather sharp teeth.

  The woman took an involuntary step back, then turned to watch him go down the stairs, forgetting—as P.B. had intended—to look for who he had been talking to. Wren used the opportunity to move to another mat, just in case the woman had seen where P.B. had been squatting.

  By the time the host turned to see how the guest was reacting to the gym, the blonde was gone, down the stairs and after her target.

  “Why is it the jobs that pay crap always get so damn complicated?” Wren wondered out loud, then went back to doing her crunches, starting from the beginning again.